Panic at the disco. Three weeks into Trump the Sequel’s executive order blitz, with technology industry legends standing at the president’s side, and figures throughout the government and media likening the newly-minted Department of Government Efficiency’s staff and budget cuts to the rise of fascism, there are two things everyone finally seems to agree on: the Deep State really does exist, and it really does run our country. Now we’re mostly just divided over the question of whether that’s a good thing, and a little shocked by what these people actually look like (yes, I’m about to be petty).

As it turns out, there is no mysterious cabal of chain-smoking men in the shadows, quietly pulling the strings of our country. Much as we saw in tech throughout its era of shameful censorship, the Deep State — our actual government — consists of a decentralized network of value-aligned (center left) normie career bureaucrats numbering in the tens of thousands, with a good sprinkling of sexless, joyless, untethered they/them radicals (extremely, psychotically far left) who have taken root in their ranks like parasites feeding off the carcass of FDR’s legacy (don’t get me started). They have no leader. They absorb their marching orders from the culture, which has until now protected them. While they’re of considerably lower skill than most of what we saw from the radicals in tech, they’re more difficult to dislodge, and far more empowered. They were also largely invisible until they were threatened. But now, with his new general Elon Musk, Trump is over the target, and our nation has entered a power struggle unlike anything most of us have ever seen.

In just the last week: One of the highest-ranking members of the Treasury Department resigned rather than comply with Trump’s directive to grant the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to the government’s payment system, which it requested for audit; USAID officials, with a budget of over $40 billion a year, were put on leave after attempting to thwart an audit; the General Services Admission (GSA), a kind of bureaucratic layer managing property and procurement among many other agencies, was seized and exposed for a variety of racist and sexist hiring practices, directives euphemistically described as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and what appears to be an explicit strategy of bloating the government with like-minded radical gender goblins dedicated to the Trump Resistance (it seems they’ve mostly all been fired); thousands of government sites and site pages were deleted, including pretty much everything related to DEI; over two million federal employees were offered a buyout, much as Twitter employees were offered a buyout before the company’s mass firings; government unions, which for some reason continue to 1) exist, and 2) bargain with each other on behalf of the US taxpayer (the US taxpayer always loses) urged employees not to accept the buyout; and the FBI vowed… I mean it sounds like they are urging agents to fight against the president?

I don’t think it would be hyperbolic to describe this as a kind of war between the president and the unelected bureaucratic class. Certainly, both sides seem to view the fight as existential. Of course, the problem for the bureaucrats is even while under tremendous pressure, they don’t seem to move much. And Elon never stops. “Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend,” he posted on X, “so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days!” Then, a good number of them also aren’t very bright. Amidst the chaos, in a major scoop from Bloomberg, we learned Pentagon employees connected their work computers to Chinese servers to take a break and screw around with DeepSeek.

Anyway, guess which side the “democracy defenders” have taken?

“If you don’t realize that Trump is trying to take full control of our government,” said Congressman Daniel Goodman of the democratically-elected executive’s efforts to run the executive branch rather than the unelected bureaucrats who share the same politics as Congressman Daniel Goodman, “you aren’t paying attention.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a little more clever. “This is a five alarm fire,” she posted to X. “The people elected Donald Trump to be President — not Elon Musk.” Given she understands the institution of a permanent, unelected class of power refusing to cede control of the country to its duly-elected executive is a bad look for a democracy-obsessed (she says!) “socialist” like herself, Ocasio’s only real move is pretending Trump doesn’t exist. This isn’t about democracy, she argues. This is about a random billionaire monster who teleported into D.C. and started terrorizing all the queer bisexual librarian women in loving, straight relationships who run our country.

Naturally, the press has echoed the Deep State. “This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by a private citizen of unlimited means with no restrictions and no transparency,” said Kara Swisher of a man presently working for the democratically-elected president of our country, following his orders directly, and who at any moment can be (and ultimately almost certainly will be, let’s be honest) fired. “It’s a coup,” said Lindsay Owens of Groundwork (some kind of tedious, commie, dark money think tank), which was echoed throughout the press. “…what's going on right now really is a genuine crisis,” said Jesse Singal, “and it should be recognized as such.”

But a crisis for who? I don’t share politics with the Deep State, and am not a huge fan of permanent, unelected, unaccountable power in general, so maybe this is hitting me different. In any case, I’ve been wondering: where is this level of “crisis” reporting on the president’s flurry of trans orders? His dismantling of DEI? The trade war (already mostly over, by the way) or Panama (also basically handled now, but I digress). With the exception of Selena Gomez, I haven’t seen many tears for deported violent criminals, something we heard a lot about back before the election. No, panic is almost entirely focused on saving federal bureaucrats. Why?

“The deep state,” said Bill Kristol, “is far preferable to the Trump state.”

At this point, I think we have to start believing what these people say. They don’t conceive of our president as much more than a government figurehead. Real power, they seem to believe, belongs to the unelected state. There is probably a steelman for this. Or, there probably once was.

The Deep State has been stable for about eight decades. This stability was key to surviving the Cold War, and World War II before that, back when FDR constructed the first semblance of our bureaucratic machine: it had to be big enough to compete with foreign tyrannical mega states, it had to be competent, and it had to survive elections. Today, it’s possible Trump’s critics are right, and dismantling a great deal of our unelected power may be bad for the country in some way they’ve not yet verbalized. But one thing dismantling this power is not — can certainly, by definition, not be — is anti-democratic.

With FDR long gone, and the Cold War long over, the machinery built to defend us from foreign power rusted, degraded, and slowly rotted. With no external threat demanding competence, weak men flourished in the system. These men hired even weaker men, who in turn hired… whatever it is we’re looking at today. Much as a beached whale carcass puffs up with gas, the size of our government bloated as it atrophied. Now, the state is mostly a jobs program for mediocre people, and at its very worst it’s a staging ground for radicals hell bent on paralyzing the nation. I do believe we need a federal government staffed with competent men and women. I do believe there are competent men and women who still work in Washington. But the federal government is presently too big, and too full of waste, and that waste looks far too much like fraud. I do not think (most) critics are fans of the waste and fraud. But, despite their many flaws, the bureaucrats are still basically center left. And for a center leftist, I imagine this feels more comfortable than a center right president elected to power.

The New York Times noted Trump’s approach to reducing the size of the government is a near mirror image of Elon’s strategy at Twitter. This is true, and it’s worth noting panic over DOGE in Washington is also near identical to the panic we saw from the tech press when Elon took Twitter private. Back then, journalists insisted the company would die. Imminently, they said. This of course never happened, and everyone who said it would happen of course never believed what they were saying. Critics at the time weren’t afraid Twitter would shut down, they were afraid Twitter would survive — but without censorship and propaganda. Likewise, center left DOGE critics aren’t worried the government will break. They’re worried it won’t, and the center left Deep State will lose power.

To my eye, concern for the Deep State seems reasonable. Elon is absolutely wrecking these people. But even still, the tech right should be more clear-eyed. Similarities between the Twitter Deep State and the actual real ass American Deep State end at the media freaking out over their destruction. This is a real war for power, and the stakes are far higher than a failed company.

Over the weekend, former candidate for Congress and darling left-wing thinkboi Will Stancil suggested Elon Musk should be executed. The sentiment is fairly common on Bluesky, where violent implications are banned but calls for actual violence are generally encouraged, a philosophy well summarized by professional crazy person Akilah Hughes, last seen defending the assassin Luigi Mangione. “Can we skip to them facing the firing squads?” she seemed to ask of DOGE employees.

Concurrently, I’ve seen this dumb Matt Y tweet making the rounds again:

There is a sense in tech that deplatforming Trump didn’t work. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is right. The mass deplatforming of the last half-decade or so very clearly did work until tech leaders had a change of heart. This didn’t teach leftists they were wrong to exercise draconian power, it taught them they were wrong to let it go. The lesson they all obviously learned was they need to seize tech in order to succeed. And that is where the game is headed. That is what will happen if the Deep State isn’t totally dismantled.

Tech, somewhat instantiated now in Elon Musk, is the perfect scapegoat — powerful, loud, and slightly offkey. If Trump fails to disempower the Deep State, the left will not come back and punish him. Or, not only. It will come for Silicon Valley. Probably one thing tech’s new right wing should try, while in a position of power, is being less of a sore winner, and leading, at least publicly, with inspiring values. Sort of accidentally, I was reminded of these values this week.

Monday, WIRED published a list of six young men working for DOGE, which immediately led to death threats for the men and their families on Reddit. Many in tech felt the reporting crossed a line. Was this doxing? Was it right to name them? And listen, I love you guys. But it wasn’t, and it is. You are the power, now. That means people are interested in who you are, and how you think. Just as you were interested in power when you didn’t have it. Still, I found it funny that the press was furious with the concept of very intelligent young people working for the government, a team of cracked boy geniuses under Elon, one of whom helped decode a 2,000-year-old lava-fucked scroll with a program he spun up for Nat Friedman:

Based as hell, quite frankly, and this is who you are. This is what the tech right should be: optimistic, talented, thoughtful, and absolutely unrelenting. All of the things that once made me fall in love with the technology industry. The qualities I myself set out to defend as our culture lost its mind, and we all got dragged into the culture war. Qualities that are actually worth defending. Worth remembering. Worth demonstrating to the public. In this battle against the Deep State, it’s important to win. It’s critical, in fact, because my sense is if you lose you will probably all end up in prison. But I think victory is also impossible without the support of the people you are fighting for, and you won’t get that unless you show them who you really are. Fight, yes. But remember who you really are.

-SOLANA